Dr Roula Nezi

This article analyses the attitudes of Greek political elites towards the European Union (EU) and compares them with the views of public opinion. Data were collected in 2007 through personal interviews with 90 MPs and a public opinion survey (IntUne project). The attitudes of MPs are discussed with regard to three dimensions of European citizenship: identity, representation, and scope of governance. There are traditionalists, formalists, and liberals among the MPs. Their trust in EU institutions and their perceptions of EU policy areas and levels of policymaking are strongly influenced by political ideology and party affiliation.

Having joined the Eurozone in 2001, Greece experienced a short period of economic euphoria before confronting a major financial crisis some nine years later. In the period between joining the Eurozone and accepting the joint IMF/EU bailout package, the economic situation facing Greek voters changed dramatically. I use this setting to test the economic voting hypothesis. Using longitudinal aggregate data from 1981 to 2009, I investigate the relationship between macroeconomic indicators and vote share of the incumbent party to test the “grievance asymmetry” hypothesis. Moreover, by using individual-level data from 2004 to 2009, I investigate the extent to which retrospective sociotropic evaluations about the state of the economy are associated with support for the incumbent party. The results suggest that sociotropic economic evaluations are associated with government party support, but in a period when the economy is at its worst the incumbent has no real chance of winning and should expect support only from its long-time loyal supporters.

Traditional theories of economic voting focusing on retrospective evaluations about the economy have been shown to fare as expected in the Greek context. Nevertheless, the current economic crisis in Greece has not only challenged the structure of the party system but also our understanding of how economic voting works in such extraordinary situations. Drawing from the context of the May 2012 parliamentary election in Greece we argue that economic voting in times of an economic turmoil can be conceptualized as a position issue. Our findings suggest that economic voting conceptualized in terms of position taking does a good job in explaining vote intentions between the incumbent versus the opposition when valence models would have otherwise faced serious challenges in doing so.

The study of policy feedback on public attitudes and policy preferences has become a growing area of research in recent years. Scholars in the tradition of Pierson usually argue that positive, self-reinforcing feedback effects dominate (that is, attitudes are commensurate with existing institutions), whereas the public thermostat model developed by Wlezien and Soroka expects negative, self-undermining feedback. Moving beyond the blunt distinction between positive and negative feedback, this article develops and proposes a more fine-grained typology of feedback effects that distinguishes between accelerating, self-reinforcing and self-undermining, specific and general, as well as long- and short-term dynamic feedback. The authors apply this typology in an analysis of public opinion on government spending in different areas of the welfare state for twenty-one OECD countries, employing a pseudo-panel approach. The empirical analysis confirms the usefulness of this typology since it shows that different types of feedback effects can be observed empirically.

Despite adopting a significantly less proportional electoral system in June 2023, more parties entered the Greek parliament compared to May 2023, which constituted a 'first round' of the 2023 Greek national elections. From a comparative politics perspective, this seems counterintuitive. Moreover, the centre-right New Democracy consolidated executive and electoral power vis-& agrave;-vis left SYRIZA, which is in steady decline. To provide a systematic analysis of the June 2023 election, we use Bartolini's (2002) dimensions of politico-electoral competition: availability of voters, contestability, decidability, and incumbent vulnerability. Our analysis highlights the role of the legacy of the economic crisis and electoral reforms, which affected the translation of votes into seats and the eligibility of voters and parties, in producing a dominant party and a fragmented opposition.

This contribution examines the turbulent period of 2010-12 when Greece became the first European Union member state to accept the International Monetary Fund/European Union bailout package, which had significant electoral consequences. The May 2012 election was characterised by unprecedented electoral volatility and a reshuffling of the party system. An understanding of this development is sought by focusing on the relationship between government and opposition parties in terms of their MPs' legislative voting behaviour on key economic bills in the aforementioned period. It is observed that although the economic crisis seems to have decreased the importance of the traditional left-right dimension, the bailout agreements reinforced the conflict between the responsive and responsible aspects of representative government and created a new conflict dimension over supporters and opponents of the bailout agreements. This contribution concludes with a call to reassess the impact of European integration on national party systems.

Voting advice applications (VAAs) have proliferated in recent years. However, most VAAs only match their users with parties, at least in part because creating a VAA matching voters to individual candidates tends to be more labour-intensive. This could be an important missed opportunity. Candidates may deviate from the party line, but voters are often unaware of the policy platforms of individual candidates and therefore rarely hold them accountable for their issue positions in candidate-based elections. VAAs providing information on issue congruence with individual candidates could help to rectify this. We evaluate the potential of candidate-level VAAs by integrating a randomized experiment into a real-world VAA whereby users were exposed either to candidate-level VAA advice or to more standard party-level VAA advice. Our results suggest that candidate-level VAAs are worth the extra effort: they help voters distinguish candidates from parties and cast votes that are more in line with their policy preferences.

Late Peter Mair argued that, in the contemporary multilevel institutional setting of global governance, parties are faced with a dilemma between Responsiveness and Responsibility (RR dilemma). However, Mair did not theorize variation in how different parties experience the RR dilemma (degrees of tension) and how they manage it (strategies). We develop his work in three ways: first, we advance variants of the RR dilemma, where the tension party leaders face differs, and elucidate how viable contenders for executive office are likely to behave in each of these scenarios, and why. Second, we highlight domestic institutional factors (electoral rules and leadership autonomy) that regulate the pressure for responsiveness to public opinion and to partisans. Third, we place the RR dilemma in the context of multidimensional issue competition, which helps identify strategies for managing it. Finally, we provide an empirical illustration of our arguments using data on public opinion and partisans. We show that although responsibility can be combined with (some) voters’ representation, tension is high when leaders are constrained and partisans oppose responsibility even if the public endorses it; also, under disproportional electoral rules when the public opposes responsibility, even if party supporters endorse it.

The onset of the economic crisis and the austerity measures outlined in the EU\IMF bailout were followed by a series of large-scale protests in Greece. The continuous mobilization, for several weeks, of the Indignant Citizens was a distinct part of the overall events during this period. In this article, we focus on the mass mobilization of protesters who occupied Syntagma Square in May-June 2011. For our analysis, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the protesters involved in the mobilization. Focusing on their political attitudes, the article approaches their perspectives on democracy. Our results suggest that the Indignants' acceptance of an idealized form of democracy on the one hand, and the distrust of parliamentary practices, actors, and performance on the other, signify a demand for a new politics beyond the framework of representative democracy. Disappointment with representative politics and the glorification of direct democracy constitute the most important facets of this mobilization which left its mark on the Greek political scene.

Public opinion research has found that increasing the investment in education is generally very popular among citizens in Western Europe. However, this evidence from publicly available opinion surveys may be misleading, because these surveys do not force respondents to prioritize between different parts of the education system or between education and other social policies, nor do they provide information about citizens' willingness to pay for additional investment in education. To address these deficiencies, we conducted an original, representative survey of public opinion on education and related policies in eight European countries. Our analysis confirms that citizens express high levels of support for education even when they are forced to choose between education and other areas of social spending. But not all educational sectors enjoy equally high levels of support: increasing spending on general schooling and vocational education is more popular than increasing spending on higher education and early childhood education. Furthermore, we find that citizens are, in fact, willing to pay additional taxes in order to finance investment in education, at least in some countries and for some sectors of the education system.

How does division in society along cultural issues influence affective polarisation? This paper argues that affective polarisation expressed as a group identity on the basis of partisanship can enforce inter-group conflicts on cultural and austerity issues. In our study we employ data from a newly collected data in Greece. Our analysis suggests that cultural and austerity issues reinforced divides and inter-group conflicts even today. Our findings have implications for understanding how affective polarisation can be conditional on views towards cultural and economic issues.